For a long time, people thought that most American men, especially from the Baby Boomer generation, had steady jobs as their standard. However new research challenges this idea and shows what happens when we stick to the belief that men should always be the main breadwinners, even though the actual job market is very different.

A recent study at Penn State found that only 41% of Baby Boomer men they looked at had a consistent, high-paying job throughout their prime working years. Instead, most men in the study had less stable jobs. They went through periods of increasing unemployment, took breaks from working because of personal reasons, or had jobs on and off.

“It’s way more movement than we would expect,” the researchers explain. “There’s this stereotype that men don’t move in and out of the workforce, that they go to work, they stay in, and they’re done when they’re 65. The big picture is that men’s work is not nearly as stable as we think, particularly for men who have a high school degree or less.”

Serious implications

The research builds on previous studies that have shown that chronic unemployment can have significant health implications, both due to the loss of health care for the unemployed and also the stress involved.

“Some of our earlier work has really shown that some of these things matter a lot for your health at midlife,” the authors explain. “Previous studies have found that failing to achieve these perceived employment norms can negatively affect men’s health, create financial instability, reduce their social status and strain their personal relationships, among other things.”

The researchers delved into the work experiences of men by studying a group of 4,538 men from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. These men were born between 1957 and 1964 and were living in the U.S. in 1979.

From 1984 to 2021, the researchers tracked these men’s involvement in the workforce every two years, covering almost their entire prime working years. They categorized their work patterns into six groups based on their time spent employed, unemployed, or out of work.

Stable work

Out of these men, 41% had a stable work pattern. About 25% had periods of unemployment and being out of work early in their careers, but then moved on to more consistent work. On the other hand, 13% started with stable employment but then shifted to more irregular work. The remaining 21% faced more uncertain job situations, involving intermittent work and leaving work early.

“These data allowed us to see longitudinal patterns of men being in and out of the workforce, as opposed to the snapshot of the labor market that you’d see from the census data that just tells you who’s in and who’s out at a given period of time,” the researchers explain.

They observed that the increase in uncertain jobs, like more involuntary part-time work and a higher risk of losing jobs, along with the decrease in quality jobs for men—such as fewer unionized positions and reduced health benefits at work—might be reasons for men stepping back from the workforce.

Considering that fewer men have stable jobs than what was previously assumed, the researchers believe these findings could have implications for how policymakers understand and respond to men’s work situations.

“For employers, specifically, the data may suggest that if they don’t want to have intermittent workers, that the work needs to be rewarded at a rate where people are less likely to feel they have to leave,” the authors conclude.